I Think I Love You (30 page)

Now, in her own home, when Molly yells from the top of the stairs, demanding some missing item of laundry, or tells her mum she just doesn’t get it, Petra tries to be glad.

You have a child who can call you an idiot and says that she hates you, secure in the knowledge she will still be loved, Petra tells herself.

It feels like progress, of a kind.

In her marriage, Petra played second fiddle to her husband, which was funny when you came to think about it. Second fiddle. Technically, as a cellist she was his equal. At college they had vied for the same prizes, though Marcus always had the edge in drive and ambition. Anyway, it didn’t really matter because she worshipped him and she was delighted and astonished to be loved in return by such a man, such a catch. A son-in-law who practically made her mother swoon with approval. At the wedding, it was Greta who mouthed “I do” first.

She heard Marcus before she saw him. Exploring the college basement during her first term, looking for the coffee machine, she found herself in a long corridor lined with practice rooms, which had portholes set high in the dark wood doors. As she waited for the thin, tawny liquid to fill the plastic cup, the sound of a cello came from the room opposite. She stopped dead, seeking to place it. Yes. Chopin. Introduction and Polonaise, early Chopin. “Drawing-room stuff,” one lofty fellow student had said to her once, tossing his hair, and she had thought, Not in my drawing room, mate. Wished she had said it to his face. Not that he would have understood; he couldn’t imagine a world where there were no drawing rooms. A world like hers.

And now, here it was again; shorn of the piano accompaniment, played naked on a damp Tuesday morning, with rain in the air outside. Just the kind of morning that was crying out for Chopin to come and rescue it. Who was playing? Her fingers tingled. Odd reaction, not so very far away from lust. A chord of different feelings: admiration, curiosity, the faintest touch of envy. The best musicians answer something in you when you don’t even know the question. Petra couldn’t resist. She walked up to the door and, on tiptoe, peered through the porthole, like one passenger on a ship pursuing another. Marcus was sitting, half facing in her direction, head bowed, bow sweeping, eyes half lowered or closed, she couldn’t tell. When he finished, he opened them and looked straight at her, as if he knew she’d been watching. Probably had, the fiend. His lips were slightly parted, and he looked out of breath. It was another four years before she felt those lips on hers. Four years between the Introduction and the Polonaise. Dance with me.

Petra had other boyfriends in the meantime. All of them English, all of them out of reach. Top drawer. They were amused by her accent, and, in the pub, they did impersonations of a cartoon way of speaking she had never heard.

“
Well, look you, there’s lovely, boyo.
”

Boyo
?

The proud daughter of a self-improver who swore by
Reader’s Digest
’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” Petra had never heard such a thing, let alone said it. To her ear, this singsongy mimic sounded not Welsh but Indian, though, like a good sport, she laughed anyway
and accepted another shandy. Colluding with what other people thought about you felt easier than explaining who you really were. The more English, the more cultured and the more alien the men, the more Petra wanted them. Getting the emotionally unavailable public schoolboy to become available to her, the girl from Gower, that was what gave her the special jazzed-up feeling, the feeling she craved. She hoarded their protestations of love like other girls hoarded jewels. Where was the thrill in conquering those who wanted you? She couldn’t see the point. Pain and joy braided tightly together, that was what Petra craved. And no one played that tune as well as Marcus.

Oh yes, he had strummed her pain with his fingers, all right. Killed Petra with his song.

“Well, that’s one of the most desirable properties off the market,” sighed Jessica, the viola player in her quartet, when Petra showed her the ring Marcus had given her in Florence. An emerald jealously guarded by two diamonds. The envy of other women sealed her happiness. She had never been the object of envy before and she noticed how it could fill you up, the same way thirsty flowers took in water. How had she, Petra, managed to win the unobtainable man? She felt blessed; better still, she felt
chosen
.

So the rest didn’t matter. Second fiddle was the instrument she had always been destined to play, some small voice inside told her. Besides, it was only practical; you couldn’t really have two professional cellists in one house. So Marcus built his career on the public platform and, after a few well-received solo appearances, Petra began to scratch a living in the cracks—concerts with the quartet, session work, teaching. She did several lucrative stints as a backing instrumentalist on
Top of the Pops
, playing, as requested, in a short black skirt, which was meant to look sexy, but ended up gynecological, when your instrument was gripped between splayed knees.

Marcus took out a bank loan to pay for a part share in a very valuable cello to use in recitals, and they needed her money to meet the day-to-day bills. The magazines she rarely had time to read these days had some fancy new term for what she did
—portfolio career
—but Petra knew what she was. Second fiddle.

Everything changed when Molly Isolde was born at twenty-nine
weeks. Her daughter was the size of a gym shoe. It was June, and Petra was due to play at the Wigmore Hall that lunchtime. Borodin, Second String Quartet. She was humming the Nocturne under her breath as she hurried to make up for time lost on a train delayed at London Bridge. The heat had taken the capital by surprise, just as London was always surprised, quite predictably, every summer by the sun and every winter by the cold.

It was so damned hot, and she was breathing for two. The air struggled to reach the farthest corners of her lungs. Alveoli. She hadn’t thought of the word since she’d taken Biology. Lungs were structured like trees and alveoli were the little buds on the end of the branches. They played some key role in making the oxygen, she couldn’t remember what, but they weren’t making it now, or not fast enough, anyway. Petra was always amazed how the present and the past could be going on in your head simultaneously, like hundreds of TV channels behind your eyes. Here she was, in the thrumming center of London, yet also back in the Biology lab in South Wales, which reeked of gerbil sawdust and jars of formaldehyde.

Oxford Street was packed, the shoppers moving slowly, torpid as carp in an overstocked pond. Petra was in a hurry, so she broke off the main road and took a shortcut up the small, L-shaped street by the Tube where she often stopped to buy a single mango from the fruit stall. She always took it to the square behind John Lewis. Mango eating, she firmly believed, should be a solitary activity because of the dribbling problems. So Petra was inching her way up Regent Street, maneuvering her bump and her cello like a plumber’s toolbag, when she felt the water sluicing down her legs. It wasn’t just a trickle of water, it was a comedy bucketful thrown by a clown.

Embarrassment came first—she was Welsh, after all. Then panic. Fear took a little longer to kick in. A security guard outside Broadcasting House took pity on the pregnant woman crouching in a puddle on his patch of pavement. An ambulance was called and within minutes Petra was in the hospital. One of the best in the city, fortunately, with a specialized premature baby unit. When they were admitted—it was definitely
they;
she already thought of the baby as a separate person—they were surrounded by broken, bloody, tearstained bodies.

The doctor stuck in a needle, a steroid injection to encourage the baby’s lungs to grow faster. Undeveloped lungs could be a problem, he was saying. Alveoli again. But Baby was already on her way; there was no stopping her.

“
If You let her live, God, if You will please just keep her alive, I promise …
”

Petra began that sentence many times during Molly’s first few days, but she never completed it. It seemed beyond saying, beyond any words she knew at least, how much she was prepared to promise if her baby girl could pull off the miracle of survival. Her own life Petra would have discarded in an instant for the sake of this tiny stranger.

She never knew a place called neonatal intensive care existed; most people are lucky because they don’t ever have to know. When you first go in, the unit looks a lot like a museum, except the exhibits in the glass cases are alive, or at least being kept alive by the machines, and by the fervent prayers of their parents. When Petra was wheeled in for the first time, still woozy and wearing her green hospital gown, she saw transparent box after box containing these anguished sketches of humanity. One of them was her daughter.

Shrunken, with blue eyes the size of a five-pence piece, Molly barely looked like a baby at all. Her head was not much bigger than a lightbulb, and to Petra the filaments of the brain inside seemed just as fragile. The bonnet that Greta had knitted as part of a beautiful layette swamped the baby, so, for the first month, Molly wore one of the matching woollen bootees as a hat. (Petra still keeps that lucky sock in her bedside drawer—a little yellow from the passing years, and shockingly small.)

She lived in the unit day and night with background music provided by the beeping and sighing of the machines. Each time the machine breathed for her, Molly’s throat gave a little froggy jump. As Petra found out, you learn a lot about yourself when you’re so close to that much vulnerability. You learned that if you’re tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever with your precious child.

Each of Molly’s limbs was placed inside a tiny doughnut of foam to
stop them from rubbing on the mattress. Any pressure on a preemie’s skin could be painful, the nurse said. A boy called Andy, barely out of his teens, he had spiky, gelled hair and moved in his soft shoes like a dancer. At first, Petra hardly dared touch Molly. If she held her hand next to the baby’s face, though, it did seem to calm her. Petra had this overwhelming impulse to fetch her cello and play; the baby had heard the cello every day for the seven months she’d been in the womb, so like her mother she must be missing it. Instead, Petra sang to her, humming the pieces they both knew by heart, her and the baby. The Bach suites, Elgar and the Borodin she’d been working on. Petra swore that Molly tried to turn her head.

In those first few weeks, Marcus came twice a day, bringing decent sandwiches and news and, best of all, simple animal comfort. Out in the corridor, Petra stretched her legs and recharged by burying herself in his arms, smelling the Marcus smell on his jacket. She saw that he was losing weight, his blue eyes staring out from damson sockets, and he had stopped shaving, so he was beginning to look like a holy man who has visions on top of a mountain.

James, who had been best man at their wedding, visited one Sunday and told Petra that Marcus had said the two girls in his life were suffering, and he could do absolutely nothing about it. The sense of impotence was terrible to a man who had always been able to fix everything with his hands.

One October afternoon, when Molly had just reached a normal birth weight, the consultant took Marcus and Petra into a side room. On the low pine table in front of them, there was an ominous box of Kleenex. The doctor offered water, which they declined. He was a big man, but sweet-looking; both burly and curly, with a snub nose. Petra thought instantly of one of those German teddy bears that fetch thousands at auction. If you pressed the doctor’s middle, he might have growled.

The consultant said that Molly was doing well. They were very pleased with her. The possible effects of oxygen deprivation, which had caused them concern, were no longer such a worry. Only time would tell for sure. Research suggested that babies as premature as Molly, even if they grew normally, could suffer some shortfall of confidence in
adult life. It seemed the baby could carry a memory of its difficult start. Marcus and Petra should know, the doctor said, that Molly might experience some learning difficulties.

“We’re not expecting her to be prime minister,” Marcus snapped.

Until that moment, she didn’t know how angry he was.

Did Petra train as a music therapist because she had a premature baby who could have been brain damaged? What Petra knew was that by singing to her daughter, a newborn who looked a thousand years old, she became convinced that everything we are starts with music, that maybe music has the power to mend things that can’t be mended any other way. She sang to Molly and she believed the baby heard her song, that’s all.

A few days after Petra and the baby got home, Marcus told her that he’d been to bed with someone else while she was in the hospital. He’d been under terrific strain. Some girl in a northern orchestra, when he’d had to step in as soloist at short notice. The girl had become infatuated, clingy. It was nothing. He begged for forgiveness and Petra gave it gladly. Too quickly, she saw too late. Forgiveness needs to be earned, and thereafter, Marcus thought it was going cheap. Petra, for her part, could forgive but not forget.

The week after, her mother came up on the train to stay. She took charge of the bottles and the bed linen and the shopping and the cooking. The house soon had the pleasant hum of a well-ordered hotel. Petra, still in her dressing gown for long stretches of the day and leaking milk, was tearfully grateful. Greta was at the sink rinsing out the baby’s bottles with a long, narrow brush when Petra told her about Marcus and the affair. Maybe Molly’s arrival was the opportunity to open a new chapter of intimacy and trust with her own mother.

Greta listened intently, and finally she said: “You will have to make it up to him.”

“Make it up to him,” Petra repeated.

Her mother started fitting the teats back inside their white plastic surrounds with a rubbery snap. It was an unpleasant sound, oddly punitive.